Introduction

The development of an intercultural perspective on language use depends greatly on the learner's ability to begin to view language use as a form of social action and reflect on the ways in which meanings and impressions are constructed and negotiated among speakers. This in turn requires that language learners are encouraged to move beyond pragmatic prescriptions and develop the ability to explicitly consider the role of sociocultural context in language use (van Compernolle, 2014). This chapter looks at a specific learning activity that I refer to as contextual analysis. Resonating with Crystal's (1997) view of pragmatics, contextual analysis engages learners in processes of collaborative reflection on constructed conversational dialogues, primarily from the perspective of the linguistic choices made by speakers, the sociocultural factors that might have influenced their choices, and the effects that choices appear to have on the interlocutor within the negotiation of meanings and impressions (McConachy, 2009). In concrete terms, learners are guided to pay close attention to specific utterances used by dialogue characters within sequential interaction, and then construct interpretations regarding the feelings and communicative intentions of the speakers which they justify with explicit reference to the setting of the communication, the relationship between the interlocutors and a host of other sociocultural variables. This, however, does not necessarily mean that learners are expected to come up with deterministic explanations for language use in view of context. Rather, it means that learners engage in perspective-taking and explore the potential significance of language choices within unfolding interaction. In other words, contextual analysis requires not so much a 'matching' of language forms to context, but a relating of language forms to context. Such a process mobilizes the learner's interpretive architecture and provides a route to closer reflection on learners' own assumptions about language use in context (Meier, 2010).